"Update on the future of Hexbear development: please reach out!" on Hexbear
www.hexbear.net
"As some of you may know, Hexbear development has been mostly inactive for a few months now. While the site could survive in this state indefinitely, there is nobody to fix bugs, and we are missing out on over a year of progress made on upstream Lemmy. Example features upstream have since implemented: - User blocking - Avatar/banners for users and communities - Federation There are many, many others, and the list continues to grow. Going back to Lemmy would also mean the ability to use Hexbear through mobile apps. It is unclear if some of our features, such as our emotes and our featured threads, can be merged upstream. Thus, the proposal is to **fork Lemmy again**, this time deliberately not diverging too far from upstream so it's easier to maintain the patches and apply them on top of each new Lemmy release. This is a large undertaking. There is no timeline, but we expect it to be a while before the site is migrated over to the finished fork. We're still in the early stages, but the more people involved the sooner we can progress. Primarily, we need developers (Rust & TypeScript) and ops/infrastructure people. Please reach out to me [via Matrix](https://matrix.to/#/@ella:chapo.chat) if you're interested in helping out. Thanks all. "

Nothing official yet, but Hexbear may be bringing some of their previous devs back to contribute upstream. Along with that would come a userbase roughly comparable to lemmy.ml’s daily activity. Their daily megathread regularly surpasses 1000 comments

  • gun
    34·
    3 years ago

    I hope they do it. I thought it was a mistake when they decided to rewrite the codebase with no hope of merging the federation changes. Federating their community could have brought thousands of active users into the lemmy network. Instead, it became this isolated community. I’m glad they are reconsidering now.

    • HexbearShillOP
      13·
      3 years ago

      I understood why it was done, but I think if the defork succeeds the end result will be a net positive

      • abbenm
        3·
        3 years ago

        Was it because of the amount of traffic they were getting ior something?

        • HexbearShillOP
          4·
          3 years ago

          Yeah both codebases were moving very quickly and by the time the pull requests were compiled and reviewed, both the Lemmy and Hexbear codebases were several commits ahead. It was taking up all the time of an entire core maintainer at Hexbear to manage conflicts and fix pull requests. Meanwhile the site was at the peak of its new launch spike and nearing the peak of the US presidential primary/election cycle, which was r/CTH’s bread and butter. The database was less optimized back then and Diesel did not (and iirc still does not) support cross joins, which was a major detriment to the optimizations Hexbear ended up using

  • NFT screenshotter@lemmygrad.ml
    20·
    3 years ago

    I hope this goes through, it would be great to have another major instance doing it’s own thing and would help avoid the semi-problem of lemmy.ml being the de-facto instance with the most activity by far. As it is hexbear has locked new comm creation, which if brought over through the lemmy migration would incentivize using existing communities on other lemmy instances.

  • mholiv@lemmy.world
    15·
    1 year ago

    I would be glad to see this. This being said I see a “last edited 2021” tag on the post. Is the post in question is several years or am I misunderstanding something?

  • ghost_laptop
    151·
    3 years ago

    I hope they start contributing upstream, their fork looks really nice and ti would be awesome if they could merge some of that.

    • Old_Man
      10·
      3 years ago

      We have the best emojis folks, many people are saying this.

      • ghost_laptop
        21·
        3 years ago

        Emoji support would indeed be super awesome. but from the comments in Hexbear it seems everyone would like to remain as a fork.

    • HexbearShillOP
      8·
      3 years ago

      In terms of looks, the entire frontend was rewritten from the ground up in React. So some of that may be reusable but I’m sure the design itself will be reused either way

      • ghost_laptop
        11·
        3 years ago

        I hope it does, Lemmy looks okay but it could use a fresh up.

    • edward
      3·
      3 years ago

      I’m working on redoing posts a bit, but some things I’m changing seem like they were design choices to do the opposite of what I’m doing.

    • HexbearShillOP
      4·
      3 years ago

      It means that the Hexbear fork is going to eventually be replaced with a slightly modified version of an up-to-date Lemmy. And that process will involve Hexbear community members contributing to Lemmy to try and get some of the Hexbear-specific features implemented upstream